Content Bridges Services

Press Mentions

Ad Age: Why So Many Media Companies Stumble GloballyThe few news brands that have succeeded, to greater or lesser degrees, arguably include CNN, Bloomberg, People, Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times and The Economist. Other contenders are the Associated Press, the BBC, ABC, NBC, maybe CBS, National Public Radio, News Corp. and the top U.K. dailies, said Ken Doctor, the newspaper veteran who's now an analyst at Outsell. "If a news-media organization sees itself as covering the wider world, sees it as its foundation, that in and of itself differentiates it from all the local media -- newspapers, TV, radio -- out there," he said. "If, in addition, it has substantial reporting and editing resources, then it can play. The tough part is the part we're in: Who wins the race to ubiquity and can make it pay off?"

NYT: If The Globe Were Sold, What Price? “The best guesstimate of the real price: a buck. The best of an announced price: between $50 and $100 million,” he wrote in an e-mail message. The devil will be in the details of the obligations that a buyer would assume, he said, adding that “a buck essentially represents a gentleman’s agreement: I take a liability, headache and a distraction off your hands.”
He said that the Times Company could hang on to some pension liabilities or other obligations in exchange for a higher purchase price, a number that would give the appearance that it was getting something for the more than $1 billion it paid 16 years ago. He added that no bank would be interested in financing a deal given how other deals have blown up, so “the owner’s own money is immediately at risk.”

BizTimes.com: Journal Sentinel faces daunting choices“There’s no strategy – this is panic. What we’re likely to see this year (around the country) and what we’ll see in Milwaukee too is (publishers asking) how much they need to cut back and how much they can do to still hold their place in the market. For publishers, it’s about ‘How do we stay alive and stay profitable until we can get to some sort of breathing period?’ (Economic) recovery will not bring back their old business, but it will give them some breathing room.”

AP: Threat to shut Boston Globe shows no paper is safThe threat to close the paper "sends a very clear message to all employees and unions of surviving newspapers — that this is not business as usual. This is uncharted territory....Newspapers all "have a sword over their heads," said Doctor. If the industry wants to survive, he said, "everyone has to give some blood."

Site Meter

BlogBurst

Posts from January 2010

January 27, 2010

For more on the fast-evolving world of digital news, check out my new site: Newsonomics.com

I've well used the Moses metaphors; others prefer the Jesus Tablet. But the dramedy around The Apple Launch has been as much Mel Brooks
as Biblical. It's just more interim technology after all. In fact, it's
become a tabula rasa for all our digital hopes and dreams, with the
silliness merging with the real import. (And will we remember where we
were when the announcement was made?)

That said, I'm enthusiastic about what tablets can do in the mid-term for news companies, old, new and still being born.

It
was nice visit to Mr. Jobs' Neighborhood, and see, finally, the iPad, a tablet device "thinner and lighter than an e-book." What's it mean for the
news world? He highlighted the New York Times and Time Magazine, but we
don't yet know the kind or extent of business relationships here. Off the Apple announcement, here are quick pluses and minuses for newsies:

PLUSSES

New marketing dollars, new marketing dollars, new marketing dollars.
Yes, three plusses. I believe that the biggest impact of the tablet, in
whatever six- to 11-inch forms stick will be in being a magnet for
marketing dollars. I'm not saying advertising dollars. We're seeing a
huge shift in money -- $66 billion a year in the budgets companies are
spending on their own marketing, according to an ongoing Outsell study.
The number in 2006: $22 billion. Marketers are going direct to
consumers, courtesy of multiplying Internet technology. One example: Honda's Power of Dreams.
Marketers are looking at the tablet this way: It's part of the new
"multi-touch" marketing landscape. Multi-touch, as in smartphone-plus,
let your fingers lead you in the emerging digital world. For marketing
that means experiential marketing -- social sites, games and more. The
news publishing connection: marketers want the right content to find
customers, and news audiences are part of that mix. How, when,
what and where: all to be figured out. Remember, no IAB standards for
tablet advertising yet; this is a 2011 revenue source -- if all goes
right.

The birth of long-form digital reading:
The first-generation news web has been notoriously short-form, read a
snippet and run. We don't like reading long stories on a work device,
like a laptop or desktop -- both with legacy to-do burdens -- or really
on the smartphones. We do like to nibble, a nibbling that's produced
relatively little engagement with customers online, and too few ad
dollars. On a cross-country flight last week, I looked over at my two
seatmates, and both were absorbed in their Kindles. (Yes, I was reading
a newspaper!) The hope here: the tablets will be a consumer device, not a work device, and that readers might enjoy reading news, as they have long done in print.

New revenue streams for content licensing:
If Apple wants to end-around other established players -- like Comcast
in the cable world and the wireless giants, Verizon and ATT -- it might
well pay publishers for some kinds of content. Already, it is offering
to pay Disney and CBS for their content. Certainly, not commodity news
content, but we can see advantages to Apple in lining up the New York
Times, high-quality business content and more. Ultimately, the tablet
can become a great local device: think local news and info + Yelp +
Angies List + entertainment guides + real community social interaction
and next-gen business directories. We're far away from that product
model yet; but someone -- why not a news company? -- will invent it.

MINUSES

Slow adoption. If the iPad 's initial price point is high -- though
inevitable price drops will follow -- we could be waiting until 2012 to
see meaningful adoption rates. [Add: With 3G pricing of $699 and up, this product may not be mass in 2010, but as price drops kick in, expect it, and its brethren, to become mass products by 2011.]

The familiar news bypass: You know what I mean. Tech product
companies have long devalued news, considering it like air, something
you get cheaply from somewhere, but not worth paying for, like video.
News companies are not immediate players in the Apple launch, so we may
be seeing history repeat itself.

It's a visual medium. That's why magazine publishers, through the Next Issue Media
nascent consortium got out ahead of news publishers first on this. When
we think tablet, think this new trifecta: Mobile, Video, Social. Those
are the new connection points in our evolving digital lives, and news
publishers are generally behind the curve in all of them.

Woeful technology integration: If news publishers want to
offer across-the-board -- newsprint, desktop/laptop, smartphone, tablet
-- access to their products at good price points, they need to
recognize those customers across platforms. Some like the Wall Street
Journal are ahead on this curve; others, like the New York Times, are
behind -- which is one reason the Times won't go metered until 2011.
You have to be ready for prime time to play in prime time.

It’s a good one, given that making a mid-January
announcement of a 2011 business move is highly unusual in any trade. And a year in Internet is something like 11 in real life.

So why did the Times do it?

We could say that’s a fast-track, comparing it to the health
plan’s 2014 (?) implementation, but that wouldn’t be fair, would it?

So let me offer a mix-and-match of three likely reasons for
the announcement:

It’s a
Signal to Wider News Industry:Recall
how nervous U.S. daily publishers were when NAA sponsored “paid content”
get-togethers in mid-2009. Everything was out in the public, with vendors uncomfortably
presenting panel-style. The word whispered: "anti-trust." So publishers can hardly convene a meeting in midtown
to plan a next-decade paid content world.

In fact, the Times’ move follows the many Rupert Murdoch
statements of 2009, saying News Corp publications, most not in the US, would be
finding some way to charge readers. In addition, Hearst is busy working on pay
wall plans, Skiff-enabled and otherwise, while numerous companies are working
with Journalism Online, strategizing how to launch their own metered and/or
niche content plans.

So the Times sends a signal to others: we’re going paid,
too. If many publishers follow the paid path, that’s good for the Times – less
threat of free content competition for readers.

It’ll
Take Time to Lay the Foundation and Infrastructure for the Moves: It has
the taken the Financial Times several years to develop the sophisticated
analytics and tracking technologies to optimize its metered system. While in
consideration by the Times for awhile, it will take the company time to get the
technology rolling.

Further, the Times made it clear that it wants paying
subscribers to enjoy a seamless experience across digital products, products
that will soon include desktop/laptop access, smartphones and tablets. That’s
easily said, but requires all kinds of technology integrations and customer
relationship coordination and service.In this scenario, the Times wants to make sure to get the new program
right.

It Gives
the Times Time to Change Its Mind or Tweak the Plan: Let’s say it’s the
best plan the Times can come up with today, in early, 2010. Let’s also say we –
and the Times – have no idea what 2010 has in store. Will tablets revolutionize
digital news reading and provide powerful new ad streams? Will Google decide it’s
in its best long-term interest to share revenue with news providers who supply it
the free raw fuel to feed its ad engine?
Will Apple and/or Comcast decide to pay the Times a hefty sum to include its
content in their new digital products, as they pay TV/video content providers?

Let’s say some things just come out of complete blue. The
Times can plan its new metering system, adjust accordingly and see how the
uncertain, post-recovery digital landscape plays out.

So there are three possibilities. We can mix and match them,
giving us something to speculate on until Apple’s Second Coming announcement in
a week.

It's a big bet. The New York Times, which has been thrashing about every possible kind of business model in the last six months, is making the bet on metering, meaning readers will get some number of free articles per month, then be told to pay up to get more. Nine quick questions as we digest the news:

Why now? The Times is making one, maybe penultimate, bid to save its cost structure. It still employs something more than 1100 journalists, at high wages. Those wages have been well-earned by dint of skill and accomplishment in most cases, the the internet economy and the advance of low-cost, "good-enough" content (make sure to read James Rainey's great piece, "Freelance Writing's Unfortunate New Model") is doing further damage to professional journalism economics. The Times metering plan is intended to provide a strong second leg, after advertising, to support that plan.

Won't metering kill the golden goose of mass advertising? First, let's note that Denise Warren, who runs advertising at the Times generally, is in charge of NYTimes.com. That provides a keen tie between the new experiment and the Times' main source of funding. As Warren has recently said, "If we move in this direction, we want to make sure that we're not
dipping into the advertising bucket to get money out of the subscriber
bucket." Of course, that's easier said than done; the Times thought TimesSelect would be more controllable than it was. One curious potential upside here: those who do subscribe via metering may become among the most lucrative ad targets. Look at it this way: the Times will know the most about these customers -- more frequency of usage; more clickstream data; more declared preference data -- and that's highly useful in targeting advertising.

Where else might the Times find new revenue soon? Think the other Big Apple. As Apple releases the tablet, it needs content friends. It can "pay" the Times in prominence; the two could also figure all manner of interesting revenue shares. Apple is already offering payments to companies like Disney and CBS, as its next-gen Apple TV plans take on the cable giants. Why not pay for premium news content?

What does "frictionless experience across multiple platforms," in the Times release this morning, mean? I think this is one major move, if the Times can pull it off well and quickly. In the age of the smartphone, the coming tablet, and (coming a bit after that) the Internet-mediated livingroom TV monitor, readers are already coming to expect easy, and smart, access to the their content wherever, whenever. They also will come to expect -- we're seeing it in some iPhone apps already -- the stories they save on one device to be known by another; ditto email sharing lists, stock portfolios, favorite sports team preferenes. If the Times can provide such synchronicity, then readers who are asked to pay can understand the charge as, in part, an access charge. We, Americans, love to pay for access -- think massive cable and wireless bills -- we just have thought digital news content should be free. At a panel I moderated yesterday in New York, Dow Jones consumer chief Todd Larsen, indicated a similar philosophy about universal access. One rub here to watch: who owns the customer relationship with the emerging tablet. Amazon has stubbornly clung to the position that it will "own" the customer (hey, wait a minute, that's me), while news companies -- getting a glimmer of an all-device-access future -- have pushed back, and are negotiating with Amazon's Kindle competitors, to keep their customer touch.

Isn't it suicide to charge your best digital customers for content, while allowing others to get some for free? Not really. In fact, that's what the Wall Street Journal has been doing for years. Remember the numbers: about a million paying online subscribers.....and another 19 million uniques, who get to Journal content through search engines and all manner of side doors for free.

What can we learn from the FT experience? It's all about propensity modeling -- learning patterns of user behavior, how many articles of what kind readers read within certain periods of time. It's about tweaking the dials, up and down, to capture the payments of truly loyal readers who find continuing value in the brand, while not losing a critical number of occasional visitors. It's about learning how to convert key parts of miscellaneous search engine traffic -- and understanding that most of it will never be converted.The FT offers several tiers of access: a few free articles without registration, 10 with registration and then access through subscription. The big eye-catching FT recent announcement: Content revenues are surpassing its print advertising take.

Is the FT experience relevant to the Times? Yes, no and we don't know. That's in part, what makes it a fascinating experiment to watch. FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw has told me how much the company continues to learn about customers, based on its work. One major key: getting real smart about data. The FT has hired data whizzes, gotten outside news industry thinking working with the ideas of companies like eLoyalty and people like Jonathan Mendez, to expand its knowledge base -- and then has worked the knowledge. Yes, we know business/financial content has been the leading edge of paid content, so far, but the modeling under the FT model may be the most instructive here.

What's the downside? Other than major blogosphere blowback -- winds developing tweet by tweet -- the Times runs the risk of TimesSelect 2. If readers, and lots of them run into paywalls and decide to quickly move on to still-free sources -- sources as top-notch as the BBC, Reuters, NBC, NPR and many more -- then the model could fall apart: the Times would lose its mojo as top digital (non-aggregator) news site and retard its digital ad potential. That's what makes it a big bet.

What happened to the membership scenario? One strategy the Times considered and is now apparently letting go of is membership. That would have been staying all free, but, NPR-like, asking those readers who really value "the service" to pay up. MinnPost has surpassed 1500 members in the Twin Cities, while GlobalPost has signed up about 500. Membership is promising, but tough, and ultimately, it appears the Times believes metering will pull in far more money.

January 18, 2010

Who will be next? And is the mating of banko companies
the look of the next year?

Dean Singleton bit the bitter bullet last week. After
staving off bankruptcy for all of 2009, telling MediaNews execs that the
company would not need to take that route, the company succumbed. MediaNews
is following Morris into bankruptcy, both taking the neater, pre-packaged route,
allowing quicker movement through the courts and, importantly, a continuity of
leadership.

Put together the long list of bankruptcies – Star-Tribune,
Tribune, Philadelphia Media Holdings, Journal Register, Sun-Times Group, Freedom,
Morris, MediaNews and some smaller ones – and you’ve got quite a chunk of
America’s dailies. With MediaNews – publisher of 55 dailies – joining the
second-largest US news publisher Tribune, industry guesses now turn to whether Lee, McClatchy
and Gannett can get to the other side, without a game board stop on the banko square.

That other side, of course, is murky itself, but expect it
to include more newspaper combos. Singleton, just as he was about to wheel his
hard-built company into court, told the Wall Street Journal that he wanted to
be the “aggressor” in the merger of newspaper properties. That’s an unlikely
statement from most CEOs taking their companies into bankruptcies, but it’s
pure Singleton irrepressibility [Excellent piece
by MediaNews alum Martin Langeveld on MediaNews’ spirited 25-year rise at
Nieman Lab]. After all, he and MediaNews president Jody Lodovic are set to
emerge from the bankruptcy maintaining their management of the company (through a special class of stock) and with a 20% ownership stake, as other equity shareholders
– including now-estranged, ex-partner Hearst, Skiffing off in its own direction, get nothing.

So imagine:

In the Twin Cities, the bankers who now own the
Star Tribune decide to throw in their lot with Dean. After all, he’s a
newspaper guy, and they’re not. Sure they’ve hired
a new publisher with intriguing cred, but do they really have the appetite for
a long-term turnaround?

In L.A., Tribune’s soon-to-be-owners similarly
may have little interest in staying the course. Maybe a L.A. combination, involving the Times around
lowered-cost, higher-efficiency publishing-- Singleton’s once and future trademark – is the way to go.

Anti-Trust, you say. Dean can find good attorneys to make
the case that it’s hard to see how bankrupt entities can dominate a
market!

For most of these companies, bankruptcy is just a re-set, a
way of buying some more time, as new managers or old ones try to come up with a
new strategy. Most of these companies bet on the come, taking on big debt, at
what turned out to be an imprudent time. Sure, Sam Zell’s move was laughable on
the face of it.The well-meaning
Philly and Twin Cities gambits were both cases of misunderstanding the bargains
the marketplace offered up. These weren’t distressed properties in a good
industry; they were distressed properties in a distressed and distressing
industry. For all, large debt is now seen as the anchor holding them back from a
fresh start.

The economics are fairly straightforward.

Recall a year ago when company after company had fallen into
a recession-ravaged operating unprofitability? Major staff, newsprint and
operating cost-cutting, and the easing of recession, got them back into the black,
month-to-month, many barely so. Yet debt service, once made possible by good
cash flows from existing and newly acquired properties, has become a major
barrier. Going-forward, within the new reality of the print-based news
business, it’s proven widely unsustainable to both maintain a large enough
business presence and pay off the debt. MediaNews will emerge with $165M in
debt, one-sixth of what it had on the books in December, producing a debt service
that seems much more doable. So,
even in 2010, the bankruptcies continue.

Given the harrowing last year publishers experienced – a
fifth of their business has disappeared in a single year, with little
likelihood of much of it coming back – 2010 feels
a bit better than 2009. Yes, it’s hard to know how accurate the feeling is.

Yes, this could be a plateau. Knocked down a couple of
notches, but standing tall on solid ground, dailies could move forward. Or it
could feel like a safe plateau and really be a ledge, a landing place offering
temporary comfort.

That’s the vantage point, partly obscured by rock and clouds
(the last visibility on budgeting was sighted around 2005, I think) as dailies
make a slew of vital decisions that will determine their fate. Call it the Fog of Media War. There’s precious
little wiggle room left, as publishers make such fundamental calls as:

Erect a paid content wall or not;

Bet on the tablet as the saving grace of the
time, and decide what that bet means they have to do;

Throw in their lot deeper with the winners of
the first-round news and ad aggregation, Google and Yahoo, or play them off
against the Apples, Sonys, Comcasts, Bloombergs and others making next-round
digital business moves;

Consort with Journalism Online, or Skiff, or
Microsoft, and/or re-direct the original consortium, AP

Re-consider the basics, and economics, of
content creation, as AOL-Demand-Helium-Associated Content-Examiner models upend
long-established notions of professional journalism creation.

As 2010 rolls out, that’s just the top of my list of the
real decisions that are in front of daily execs, in or out of bankruptcy. Tough
decisions, and ones better assessed from a broad Far West plateau on a
cloudless day, than on a ledge in the thick of a passing storm that’s left many
clouds on the horizon.

January 03, 2010

Not since a guy named Moses received a tablet have we seen such enthusiasm for the form.

The tablet dream -- with its inevitable Apple intrigue and drumbeat of Amazon/Apple war -- has rekindled interest in digital publishing, providing hope for magazine and news industries pummeled mercilessly over the last decade. Already Forrester's Sarah Epps is estimating 10 million tablets to be sold within a year, which may be an ambitious number given inevitable customer BluRay/HD-DVD, VHS/Betamax confusion.

Next Issue Media, the new magazine consortium of Hearst, Meredith, Time Inc., News Corp and Conde Nast, could be a serious player to come. It could become a leader in the business and product development for tablets, or it could be just another industry gabfest, advocating for open standards and common ad formats. Lots of questions here as we approach the year and decade, as news and features suss out whether out the tablet really enables a a fresh start (Content Bridges "Digital Do-Over Time," Dec. 8, 2009) . Here are my first Nine Questions. What's yours?

1. How does the tablet blur our notion of what's a book, what's a magazine and what's a newspaper? The web atomized everything, and the tablet is one form of reordering. Each device though -- a Sony Reader, a Kindle, a Nook, a JooJoo, an Adam, an Ultra, whatever -- will have a singular interface, regardless of the source of the content. That eliminates the historic difference in page size among newspapers, magazines and books, which is in fact one of the key ways we've long differentiated them. Another differentiator -- paper stock -- of course, becomes a dead (tree) issue.

2. If Apple is willing to pay video/TV production companies like Disney and CBS per channel/program to break into the TV business, is it willing to pay news content providers of any size or scale in a similar way? TV is starting to experience the same break-down that newspapers have endured, being consumed piecemeal (segment by segment, program by program) just as whole newspaper products have been sliced and diced by the web search engines and aggregators. Now, sensing an opportunity to take chunks of Comcast's and other cable providers' business, Apple is moving on to the next generation of Apple TV. And it paying providers for programming.

Is news content, in text or video or tabletized form, of sufficient value to Apple that it might pay for it, on a per subscriber per month basis, opening up a potential new revenue stream for content creators?

3) Of course, each of the early tablet notions -- Sports Illustrated, Conde Nast's Wired, Hearst's Skiff -- apparently focuses only on a single title, but what about the ability of the tablet to become a new aggregated wonder? While the tablet offers lots of new audience-pleasing abilities, we needn't think of them only in that old Twentieth Century way of cozying up in an armchair, timelessly enjoyed the just-delivered issue of our favorite periodical. In fact, everything that the tablet can do for a single title, it can do for an aggregated product -- allowing advertisers and readers to tap into multi-title wonders. Are publishers planning for this multi-title tablet world, or just focusing anachronistically on title-by-title publishing? If they're not planning a twin (single title + aggregator) strategy, just think of the list of companies who may be: Google, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, for starters.

4) Doesn't the tablet given whole new meaning to the Illustrated in SI? An old term, digitally remastered.

5) How much of a disadvantage are newspaper publishers at as the visual-forward tablet goes mainstream? It's no accident that it's the magazine arms -- Advance's Conde Nast, Hearst's magazine division -- of the print companies that have dived into the tablet pond. It's cultural for magazine editors (and ad sellers) to think visually, and they've seen what the tablet dream might mean for what they do well and best. Newspaper people -- from editors and reporters to ad salespeople selling price-and-item space -- think text. Certainly, they have long used photos, but not as well as magazine people. Here's a skills gap that newspaper publishers would have to solve quickly to take full advantage of what the tablet does best.

January 02, 2010

There she stood. This woman of small stature and enormous spirit,
atop one of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press metro desks. Yes, literally, on
the desk. Deborah was leaving the paper after a decade of pulling and
pushing it into the modern age, moving onto to Newhouse Newspapers in
D.C.

Her assembling staff knew her farewell talk would be feisty,
the word today's obits seem to have fastened on. There was no question
of that. The question: how many times, during the farewell, might she
drop one of her favorite swear words? Small bets were placed (I believe
five was the winning play), and none of us were disappointed in her
remarks. She went out, as she came into the Saint Paul. A whirlwind.

Now, she's taken her final parting, a sudden one, near Blenheim, New Zealand, as she walked across the street.

She had the energy of a hummingbird and the restless spirit that seems
to accompany it. That could annoy you when you wanted to hold her attention
to a single point, but it enabled her to have an outsized impact on her
trade, and, importantly, on hundreds, probably thousands, of journalists' lives that she
touched.

She wasn't so much of a human Rolodex as a pre-digital Linked
In. She kept in touch. She was a connector, one of the few among us who sees their role as
staying in touch, making useful connections, offering career and
personal advice. She was Karmic in a mid-century West Texas
shit-kicking kind of way.

Her
holiday card -- "I'm flunking retirement and very busy with consulting....We're headed for New
Zealand on Dec. 26 for three weeks!" -- now is an aching reminder of
that spirit and that connectedness. She was an editor unafraid to use
an exclamation point; a "bang" says so much about her many enthusiasms.
The thought of her beloved Tetons moved her as much as a kick-ass Page
One exclusive.

Deborah
Howell met me at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Airport in early 1986.
Before we got out of the terminal, we both knew this was a job fit --
features editor at the newly combined Saint Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch
-- that would work. I took the job, and Deborah tutored me on the ways
of big-city union newsrooms, The Cities themselves and how to buy "a
good Knight Ridder suit" for my first corporate conference.

Her
greatest gift to me is a saying I still hear, as I hit the send button
on posts today. She told me that great editors listen to the voice in
the back of their heads. In the cacophony of newsroom deadlines and
multi-tasking, there are often too many competing voices coming in
through both ears. Every once in a while, Deborah said, a voice will
say, hold on, check it again, is that what you really want your
newspaper to say?

That lesson has saved me countless times.

She
had a hard edge and a soft heart. The edge was honed by the all those
early years of being a woman in what was supposed to be a man's
profession. When Old Boy's Clubs met Deborah Howell, the fight wasn't
really fair; the old order, as it often does, fought with half of her
passion. She was of that generation of women pioneers, arriving in
Saint Paul in 1979. Three decades ago. It was not long after the Saint Paul Athletic Club,
connected by skyway across Cedar Street, had just gotten rid of its
elevator operators (much to Bernie Ridder's chagrin, I'd heard), but
still had only a fleet of black-and white photos of suited white men on
its walls.

She enjoyed the editor's prerogative of
intoning "because I said so," partly for dramatic effect -- the woman
knew how to command a meeting or a room -- but also because she'd
learned it was a way to get lesser-talented males to back off.

That
Texas-honed hard edge didn't get in the way of her learning, as Jeff
Jarvis -- a collaborator of hers through work with Newhouse and Advance
Internet -- points out
well in a post today. She was endlessly curious about how our world of
journalism is changing, what fit and what didn't. As her time as
Washington Post ombudsman ended a year ago, she had new scars of the
trade earned in that meat-grinder of a job, as the Post toddled into
unprecedented engagement of its audience. The last time I saw her, she was beginning to pack up her mementos of a lifetime in dailies, and talking about moving on to consulting, to keep her hand in the game.

Today, on a light, holiday news weekend, the news of her passing has spread like wildfire.

As the first
commenter on Jeff's post noted: "So odd to get news of a death via
social media." Odd, but increasingly common, as we all become each
other's editors. Odd, but an irony Deborah would have found first
fascinating and then worth knowing about.

As we
think of how to memorialize her -- "The Howells"? -- and that spirit we should keep lit, her own words, also well-quoted today, stand as
clearly in the gawky adolescence of the digital news age as they did
for an early one:

"Journalism should be as accurate as human beings can make it and it
should be enlightening, fair, honest and as transparent as possible.
Mistakes should be acknowledged and quickly corrected. When you finish
reading The Post, you should feel more informed than when you began. I
truly believe a democracy can't operate without a free press."

We are left, almost wordlessly, in our offering our condolences to her husband Peter McGrath and her extended clan, one of whom -- Chris Coleman -- is being sworn in Monday as mayor Saint Paul.

Let me end with her own words, taken from her first column as Washington Post ombudsman. They ring true and give us all direction on the digital frontier: